Since then the undertaking has fallen off in circulation; various new monthlies have come into existence to enter into active rivalry with this great-grandmother of reviews. At that time it was in full flower; it had a circulation of 25,000 copies and brought its stockholders large and ever-increasing dividends. At that ball M. Buloz told me that his father had for thirty years published the magazine under a deficit; then suddenly came the change—the _Revue_ was read all over the world and its owners became millionaires. “You see, gracious lady,” added M. Buloz jestingly, “if a periodical has been kept up for a time, it can expect further duration and some profit; only the first thirty years are rather hard sailing.” The connections which we formed at the Buloz house brought us into relations with various members of the Academy. I remember one evening which we spent with Victor Cherbuliez and when we met Ernest Renan. It was but a small circle of people that was grouped around the fireplace there, and the result was a genuine _causerie_, such as cannot be had in reception rooms filled with hundreds of people. There were present M. and Mme. Cherbuliez and their daughter; M. and Mme. Renan; M. de Rothan, a former diplomat and author of highly valued political articles and contemporaneous reminiscences, especially regarding Alsace-Lorraine; his wife; and lastly, Ludovic Halévy, the latest of the Academicians. The merry blasphemer of the Grecian Olympus,—for with the aid of the equally merry Meilhac he had exposed Jupiter, Juno, Venus, and Mars to Offenbach’s musical mockery,—the creator of Madame Cardinal, mistress of the household, and her daughters who “went on the boards,” was sparkling with wit in his conversation too. As a novelist, however, he was also successful in striking the serious strings; remember his novel _L’Abbé Constantin_, with its tinge of sentimentality and its harmlessness for boarding-school misses. And by no means did he fail to make the famous patriot fiber vibrate; he became the historian of the invasion of 1871, and celebrated the military glory and the heroic misfortunes of the conquered. So it came about that when the conversation that evening touched upon the predominant question of the day—the threatening war-cloud—Halévy welcomed, with some pathos, the possibly approaching day of requital. Renan excitedly took the other side. He did not conceal his horror for national massacres in general, but as a thinker he was especially pained by the hostility between his nation and “the nation of thinkers.” He acknowledged that he had learned much from German philosophy, and spoke with the greatest respect of its representatives in both older and later times.